As Firefox fans and users know, Firefox will release version 57 later in November. The new version of the browser will only allow add-ons that are compatible with the WebExtensions API, so the Adblock Plus development team has already been busy getting our award-winning add-on ready.

Mozilla is starting to enforce their signing on all add-ons: Firefox 40 already warns about unsigned add-ons, Firefox 41 Beta outright disables them. This isn’t a big issue for our add-on releases as these are signed by addons.mozilla.org (AMO) automatically. However, the development builds were hosted on our own servers until recently, no such signing there.

Because of that, a few weeks ago we moved our development builds to AMO to have them signed automatically. You can also download them from AMO directly (see Development Channel section in the extension description). Anybody who installed development builds from our website should be upgraded to the AMO-hosted builds automatically.

The news is making the rounds that the memory consumption of Adblock Plus can be considerable in some scenarios. While some scenarios mentioned (like the page that requires almost 2 GB of memory) are really edge cases, and unlikely something you will ever see during regular browsing, the issue is certainly real. It isn’t exactly unknown either and we have been looking into ways to resolve it for a while already.

For a while, I have been occasionally misusing the Adblock Plus project blog for articles that had no relation to Adblock Plus whatsoever. I posted various articles on security, Mozilla and XULRunner there, general extension development advise, occasionally some private stuff. With the project growing and more people joining I am no longer the only person posting to the Adblock Plus blog, treating it as my private blog isn’t appropriate. So a while ago I decided to set up a separate private blog for myself and now I finally found the time to implement this. My off-topic blog posts have been migrated to the new location. Now you can read my blog if you are interested in the random stuff I post there, or you can keep reading the Adblock Plus blog if all you are interested in is Adblock Plus.

Adblock Plus users who decided to disable tracking have been complaining about severe issues on some websites for a while already. On the websites in question, clicking a link simply wouldn’t do anything unless one disables Adblock Plus. Our investigation has shown that bugs in Adobe SiteCatalyst are to blame for this issue. SiteCatalyst is a tracking solution that Adobe acquired from Omniture. A “forced link tracking” feature introduced recently is the source of these issues. Originally it was enabled for Google Chrome only, in a follow-up version for Mozilla Firefox as well.

TL;DR: Some Firefox installations don’t support strong encryption and I wonder why that is.

There is one issue with relying on community-supplied filter lists in Adblock Plus: these lists are sometimes hosted on unreliable services that will go down without any prior notice. That’s why a fallback solution had to be designed in the early stages of the projects: if a client cannot reach a filter download server several times in a row it should query a fallback URL which could reply with a new location for that filter list. These fallback requests can also be used to notice issues with filter downloads that the owners of the filter lists didn’t notice themselves.

As Adblock Plus is growing rapidly, we are constantly breaking new thresholds. Today, world’s most popular extension has achieved a new milestone that no one before us was able to reach: we have reached the 200th million download on Firefox. This makes Adblock Plus the first browser add-on ever to generate that many downloads on a single platform.

I still believe that the Do-Not-Track proposal is the most promising idea to let users opt out of tracking, it offers some value even to the people using Adblock Plus with the EasyPrivacy filter list. The proposal gained a lot of traction already and will continue to gain speed. Adblock Plus was one of the first implementors, and yet I decided that this feature is no longer worth keeping.